Settle in and escape with more new fiction
Rain fell on Los Angeles this week, prompting us to pull out the sweaters and afghans, if ever so briefly. If the chill suggested snuggling up with a great book, here are some fine new works of fiction to satisfy.
El Paso
Winston Groom Liveright, $27.95
Groom’s story of Forrest Gump, an amiable, intellectually limited man who witnesses the big events in American history, was a bestseller before it became the Oscar-winning film starring Tom Hanks. Nearly two decades after its publication, Groom has unleashed a new work of imaginative, peripatetic fiction. This 496-page novel, set during the Mexican Revolution, follows a Boston railroad tycoon with a huge cattle ranch in Chihuahua on a manhunt to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren. Groom infuses his story with real historic characters, including writer Ambrose Bierce, movie star Tom Mix and socialist journalist John Reed, and sets it against the backdrop of war in the Sierra Madre. It is a rich and engrossing tale — something Hollywood will no doubt take little time to notice.
Cruel Beautiful World
Caroline Leavitt Algonquin, $26.95
Disappearing young women are having a cultural moment — we are in an an era of literary gone girls — and so is the late 1960s. Both of these of-the-zeitgeist phenomena are present in Leavitt’s marvelous new novel “Cruel Beautiful World.” Leavitt brings to life the chaotic days of Vietnam War protests, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Manson murders as the setting for a complex story of the relationship between two sisters and a predatory teacher. The result is a captivating, timely feeling thriller.
The Best American Short Stories 2016
Edited by Junot Díaz, Series Editor Heidi Pitlor Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $14.95 paper
“On my way to the novel I fell in love with the short story,” writes guest editor Díaz in his charming, modest and winsome introduction to the new installment of this well-known annual anthology. Díaz chronicles his own struggles as a writer and recounts how he learned his craft by studying short stories. This year’s collection brings together fine stories by famous fiction writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Karen Russell, familiar to readers of the New Yorker, but a great deal of the magic is generated by the appearance of less familiar names from publications like Missouri Review or Copper Nickel. Each of these outstanding stories is, as Díaz observes, a chance to listen “to some other lone voice struggling to be heard against the great silence.”